Q&A: Director Ed Burns on Using Twitter to Make His $9,000 Movie Newlyweds

Burns at the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Newlyweds., From Patrick McMullan.

Ed Burns made his latest film Newlyweds—about a couple whose honeymoon glow is tested by a party-hearty sister-in-law trespassing on their hospitality—on a incredible $9,000 budget. After it closed the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival, Burns has now released it for broader audiences via video on demand (Dec. 26) and iTunes (Dec. 30). We talked to the director about the joys of indie cinema in the 21st century. Highlights from our chat:

Well, I was at a dinner party for a friend’s tenth wedding anniversary, someone made a joke and I said, “If it ended today, in this day and age, it would be considered a success.” Of course, everybody laughed, but then we talked about it. In this day and age ten years is sort of the success! The question was why. That was the inspiration. Writing it, I fell in love with the Buzzy and Katie characters, who were taking a more pragmatic approach. What would happen to completely rock their sense of security during the honeymoon period? I use Twitter a lot to engage with my followers, so one of the first things I did was say, “Here’s this idea, anybody have funny stories?” People tweeted in all these great ideas. A lot of them talked about a mother-in-law, a father-in-law, a brother, sister, cousin or best friend having to crash with them. I was like, okay, great, I got to bring a family member in.

Did anyone Tweet that sister slept with their wife’s ex-husband?

Ha, no one gave me that one. I wanted to base a character on how reckless someone can be who has just moved to New York for the first time—someone who will crash at your apartment and show up at 4 a.m. completely hammered. I created a character loosely based on people I knew in my early 20s. Then, I started to pull from memory incidents I’d heard back then, specifically, her bringing home a random guy at 4 a.m.

Wow, you basically crowd-sourced your movie, and for $9,000.

Yup, $9,000 to get in the can. It’s sort of a return to how I made Brothers McMullen and Nice Guy Johnny: Use actors that were unknowns, have everyone do their own hair and make-up, get the locations for free, have a three- or four-man crew, use as much available light as we can. But hopefully I know what I’m doing now.

Is this the future of indie cinema?

I think it’s the future of a slice of indie cinema—the contemporary walk-and-talk movie. If you make a period movie, the minute you start spending on wardrobe and locations and production design, then you’re not going to try to save money by not doing hair and make-up. It has to be filmed that way. But if you’re making this type of film, it’s a great way to work. Because you’re not asking somebody for $2 million, you don’t have the studio or the producer or the financier as your collaborator. The filmmaker has 100 percent creative control. When you make a $200 million movie, like, you need this movie star—even for $2 million, I’ve had the title of my movie changed, I’ve been asked to cast a guy’s girlfriend, I’ve had to change music, change dialogue, all those things, because someone else’s writing the check. The other thing is you have to shoot 35 days consecutively. Everyday when you’re on set, there’s a guy on set whose job is telling you to move on.

But this way, you can take time and have more fun.

You can shoot two days and take two weeks off. And when you take that time off, you can go into the editing room and sit there with these scenes and cut them together and figure out what’s working and not working. It’s the first time a filmmaker has had that: a novelist, a painter, a songwriter, even a screenwriter has it. The only one who doesn’t is a filmmaker. When the gun goes off, it’s a mad-dash. Now it’s not anymore, and that’s the most exciting thing.